Data is critical to supply chain success. It’s integral to devising effective business strategies, advancing productivity, delighting customers, and so much more. But your company’s data will never reach its full potential unless you have strong data governance policies in place. Through digital transformation, supply chain organizations can implement powerful data governance to improve the quality of data and its value to the overall business. Here are some benefits of digital transformation for data governance.
Compliance. Incorporating digital transformation technologies serves the primary goal of data governance: protecting sensitive data in your organization. Technologies such as data encryption, access controls, and two-step authentication safeguard data from hackers and other threats.
You can also improve your compliance protocols with this tech. Failing to comply with frameworks results in expensive penalties from the government, so using the latest digital transformation methods for protecting customer data makes financial sense. Although these technologies require an initial outlay, you should generate an investment return.
Risk management. It’s not just expensive government penalties that could cost your business money. Failing to verify customers properly could increase fraud in your organization. One recent trend is account takeover fraud, through which cyber criminals pretend to be customers before taking over an account and making unauthorized purchases from your online store. Advancing data governance with digital transformation technologies reduces this risk significantly.
One such technology is biometric authentication, an umbrella term for a bundle of security processes that verify customer identities via biological traits such as fingerprints and facial characteristics. Incorporating a biometric authentication system into your organization enables you to check biometric data when customers open a new account, preventing account takeover fraud and improving data protection and risk management. These systems serve as an alternative to traditional authentication methods such as usernames and passwords. Although biometric data is never 100% reliable, this digital transformation technology is becoming much more accurate, making it the preferred security option for organizations that want to manage risk.
Other digital transformation technologies exist for risk management. Machine learning (ML) makes it easier to predict outcomes when assessing financial risk. Software with ML capabilities, for example, helps you decide whether to lend money to a customer based on credit scoring and other financial models and algorithms. Cloud computing, another digital transformation technology, stores customer data in a virtual environment, which further reduces risk.
Foresight planning. You can't predict the fate of your business, but foresight planning provides unparalleled insights into the future, making it a valuable method for decision-making and problem-solving. Strategic foresight planning involves identifying trends and patterns that reveal possible long-range events that affect your business.
For foresight planning to work, it requires lots of data; and with lots of data comes the need for expert data governance. It's difficult to govern all the data needed for accurate foresight planning, but the latest digital transformation technologies have made the process easier. Artificial intelligence (AI) automates many of the processes associated with forecasting so you can concentrate on other areas of your business.
AI collects data from various sources such as databases, customer relationship management systems and enterprise resources planning systems. It then generates insights about almost every aspect of your business, from sales to logistics planning. Learn how customers engage with your products and services, or discover the high-value customers that are most likely to purchase from your online store. Business intelligence like this reveals insights that will guide organizational change and identifies future problems.
The best AI systems respect data governance frameworks by encrypting data and safeguarding it from external threats. Incorporate one into your organization for better forecasting and data protection.
Which technologies will you use?
Data governance and digital transformation are a match made in tech heaven, with each enhancing the other. These two principles work in tandem so you can comply with frameworks, improve risk management and optimize foresight planning. As new digital transformation technologies emerge, data governance will become a more viable and rewarding prospect for supply chains everywhere.
